Actions

Run Migration To Activate

After creating your action using the CLI run $ php system/ee/eecli.php migrate. When asked for the location, type in the name of your add-on. This will run all migrations that have not been ran for your add-on including entering the action into exp_actions.

Setting Flag To Activate On Creation

On creation of an action, you can also specify to add it to the database after the CLI creates it. You can do this with the --install or -i flag by running your make:action command like so: $ php system/ee/eecli.php make:action --install.

class [ActionName]

Inside /Actions/ExampleAction.php we see the following code generated for us:

<?php

namespace ExpressionengineDeveloper\AmazingAddon\Actions;

use ExpressionEngine\Service\Addon\Controllers\Action\AbstractRoute;

class ExampleAction extends AbstractRoute
{
    public function process()
    {
    }
}

As we can see, the CLI has correctly created a new class using our action’s name in PascalCase as the class name.

Inside of our class is the process() method. Anything we want to happen when a user reaches our action should be placed inside this process() function.

Form Data

In this example we want to insert a row into our database when a user submits a form.

For this example we’ll use a really basic form that would be found in our template which uses our action’s endpoint as the action for the form. We know our action’s ID from the exp_actions table and we’re just going to collect the user’s first name and last name. We’ll then take that information and store it in our database. For the purpose of this example, we’ll insert this into a custom table we’ve added to ExpressionEngine which just has columns ID, first_name, last_name.

Create our action:

$ php system/ee/eecli.php make:action --install
What is the action name? ExampleAction
What add-on is the action being added to? [amazing_add_on,...]: amazing_add_on

This creates our required files.

Now we had some functionality to our action which will add the first and last name submitted from a form to our custom database table.

Our action’s code (Actions/ExampleAction.php):

<?php

namespace ExpressionengineDeveloper\AmazingAddOn\Actions;

use ExpressionEngine\Service\Addon\Controllers\Action\AbstractRoute;

class ExampleAction extends AbstractRoute
{
    public function process()
    {
        // we'll use the post() method from the core's
        // Input Class to grab our POST data and put
        // that in our $data array

        $data = array(
            'first_name' => ee()->input->post('fname'),
            'last_name' => ee()->input->post('lname'),
        );

        ee()->db->insert('our_amazing_table', $data);

        return true;

    }
}

Our template code:

<form method="post" action="/?ACT=41">

    <label for="fname">First name:</label><br>
    <input type="text" id="fname" name="fname" value="John"><br>
    <label for="lname">Last name:</label><br>
    <input type="text" id="lname" name="lname" value="Doe"><br><br>
    <input type="submit" value="Submit">

</form>

A note about action IDs. For the example above, we looked up the action ID in the database. However, the action ID of your method may be different in your database than someone else as the IDs are auto-incremented by the database on insertion. Therefore, when dynamically creating the form with a custom template tag, it’s always best practice to fetch your action ID for use in a template by using the fetch_action_id() method from the CP Class library.

We would do this in our add-on’s template tag with something like this:

$aid = ee()->cp->fetch_action_id(`Amazing_add_on`, `ExampleAction`);

Return Data

In this next example we are just creating an endpoint which will be reachable from servers outside of our domain. We are going to expect the application to use cURL or similar library to post an ID to our endpoint. Upon receiving the request our action will return the name of the entry matching the ID if it exists.

Create our action:

$ php system/ee/eecli.php make:action --install
What is the action name? ExampleAction
What add-on is the action being added to? [amazing_add_on,...]: amazing_add_on

Our action code:

<?php

namespace ExpressionengineDeveloper\AmazingAddOn\Actions;

use ExpressionEngine\Service\Addon\Controllers\Action\AbstractRoute;

class ExampleAction extends AbstractRoute
{
    public function process()
    {
        // we'll use the post() method from the core's
        // Input Class to grab our POST data and put
        // that in our $data array
        $entry_id = ee()->input->post('id');

        // here we're using the Channel Entry Model
        // to request the entry's title
        $entry = ee('Model')
                        ->get('ChannelEntry')
                        ->filter('entry_id', $entry_id)
                        ->first();


        if ($entry){
            $response = $entry->title;
        }else{
            $response = "No Matching Entry"
        }

        echo $response;
    }
}

However, when I attempt to reach this endpoint from another application I get an error returned.

The request:

curl --location --request POST 'https://anamzingwebsite.test/?ACT=41' --form 'id="1"'

The response:

...
<div class="panel redirect">
    <div class="panel-heading">
        <h3>The following errors were encountered</h3>
    </div>
    <div class="panel-body">
        <ul><li>This form has expired. Please refresh and try again.</li></ul>
    </div>
</div>
...

This is because of the csrf_exempt value mentioned above. To fix this we can go into the exp_actions table of our database and update the csrf_exempt column to 1.

Now when I send that same request, I simply get the entry title I requested:

The response after disabling CSRF protection:

...
The Entry You Requested
...